This movie has been sitting on my coffee table for about the past month. I put it on the Netflix queue and kept meaning to watch it, but just never got around to it. Today, we finally did.
(The rest under the tag, since it's a fairly disturbing entry--for a fairly disturbing movie.)
The movie itself is a true-life story. During 100 days in 1994, nearly a million people died in the tiny African country of Rwanda--members of the ruling Hutu tribe started a brutal campaign to wipe out the Tutsi minority. Both tribes share the same history, the same culture, the same language, but were essentially split into two groups by the Belgians who occupied the country. So, 100 days, almost a million people, and the rest of the world did almost nothing. Most of us probably didn't even hear about it.
Interestingly enough, we talked about this in my geography class a little bit, when we were covering Africa. My instructor told us about how the Hutu soldiers came into a classroom of mixed Tutsi and Hutu children and ordered them to split up according to their tribe. When they wouldn't, the soldiers killed them all.
The movie itself came out last year, and features Don Cheadle (nominated for an Oscar for the role) as Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who housed over a thousand Tutsi refugees and Hutu sympathizers in the hotel he managed. Almost all of the 1200+ men, women, and children whom he sheltered in the hotel made it out alive.
It's an extremely powerful and very unsettling movie--radio clips from the Hutu forces refer to the Tutsis as cockroaches, an infestation to be eliminated. While the movie never descends into gore for the sake of it, there's enough to bring the point home, to make it really just...
I don't know.
Part of the trouble I had with the movie Black Hawk Down was that it was downright *gory* in places, and I couldn't watch. But with this, I couldn't pull my eyes away. I keep trying to describe parts of it, but I just can't, it's...something that needs to be watched, and something that I just do not have the right words to say. I don't write well enough. I just don't.
Very well done. It's appalling that Don Cheadle didn't win the Oscar for his role, he was amazing. The real Paul Rusesabagina is still alive, living with his family in Belgium, and was a consultant for the movie.
I have never come out of a movie or a documentary so profoundly grateful to live where I do. We might not have had money when I was very young, but I had a roof over my head, we had a car, we had hot water...and we didn't have anyone out to kill us simply because of the color of our skin. I can't even fathom what it must have been like in Rwanda in 1994, or what it must be like in Sudan today.
So, anyway. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who hasn't seen it yet, but fair warning--have company, and don't watch it expecting to be uplifted.
Posted by Liz at June 11, 2005 08:54 PM